It is well known that Quechua is spoken widely in several
countries in the Andes, particularly in Ecuador, Peru and Bolivia, but also in
northern Argentina and by small numbers of people in other countries.It is also well known, though, that Quechua
is not by any means the same everywhere.The Quechua in one country or region can be quite different, sometimes
very different, to the Quechua spoken in another country, or even in another
region of the same country (especially in Peru).Let’s start by listening, on your computer,
to a couple of examples of the differences between the Quechua spoken in
different regions.

We’ll begin with the Quechua spoken in just two particular places
in Peru, which happen to illustrate the differences well.It so happens, too, that both of them have
been designated by the United Nations’ Cultural Organisation (unesco) as ‘World Heritage Sites’, in recognition
of their great importance in the history and culture of the Andes.These two places are:

•Cuzco,
the old Inca capital in Southern Peru;

•Chavín
de Huantar, in the Ancash department of central Peru, home to one of the oldest
cultures in the Andes, many centuries before the Incas.

[For more details on any of
the regions we talk about here, including photos of each one, go to our Quechua Regions page.]

To hear how people who speak Quechua in each of these regions
would say their Quechua words for three and here, just move your mouse over any of the below (or if you don’t hear anything, try clicking on them).

As you can hear straight away, these words are pronounced very
differently in these two different regions of Peru.If you speak Quechua from another different
region or country, then your own form of Quechua may be either similar or
different to either or both of these.Most Quechua speakers in Bolivia, for example, do pronounce these words
in a very similar way to Cuzco.Here are
the pronunciations in the Sucre region of Bolivia, for instance:

three

here

In most of Ecuador, meanwhile, such as in the Chimborazo province
in the central highlands, and in many other regions of Peru like Ayacucho and Huancavelica,
the word for three sounds slightly different to
Cuzco and Bolivia, though the word for here is
pronounced the same:

three

here

You can already hear that there is a lot of diversity here.In fact, as we look at more and more words,
the relationships between the different regional forms of Quechua become more and
more complicated:in which words they
pronounce the same and which they pronounce differently, in exactly how similar
or different their pronunciations are to each other, and so on.

One useful way to think of these different regional varieties of
Quechua is to compare them to a human family.We can consider that Quechua of Cuzco and Sucre are ‘sisters’ of each
other.Ecuador Quechua, though, is more
different, because it is only their ‘cousin’, not another sister.The Quechua varieties of Central Peru like
Chavín are more different again, because they are even more distant ‘cousins
once removed’ within the very big, extended Quechua family.More on this soon below.

Let’s go back to the biggest difference we’ve met so far:the pronunciation of here
in and in .In fact part of the difference here is not
just in pronunciation, but in grammar.The first part of the words is just a question of pronunciation
differences in the word for this, [kay] vs. [kee].The
second part is a ‘location’ suffix, to turn this
into in this place (i.e. the meaning here),
and for this Cuzco uses ‑pi, whereas Chavín
uses ‑ĉaw, which it now pronounces [čoo].These are not just different pronunciations of the same suffix, they are
quite different suffixes in any case.(You can see this because Cuzco Quechua does still actually has both
forms, because it still uses ‑ĉaw in a
few words like pun‑chawday, and in fact both occur alongside each other in chaw‑pimiddle.)

People in Cuzco and Chavín can still understand quite a lot of
each other’s words, so long as they happen to be ones that are not pronounced
too differently, such as for example the words for hand,
pronounced pretty much identically [maki] in
almost all regions:as you can tell here
for , , , and .They might even be able to understand
occasional short phrases in each others’ Quechua, but certainly they cannot
understand complete conversations.There
are simply too many differences between these two regions, in the pronunciation of a great many words, and on
other levels too, in vocabulary and in grammar.(Obviously, in Sounds of the
Andean Languages we concentrate on the differences in
pronunciation.If you wish to learn
about differences in vocabulary and grammar too, then go to our More Details About Quechua page.)

In the end, there are so many differences between Cuzco Quechua
and Chavín Quechua that the people from these two regions cannot really
understand each other well at all when each of them is speaking his or her own
native variety of Quechua.In fact, the
forms of Quechua spoken in these regions are so different that we can’t even
properly call them varieties of the same single Quechua language.So to be strict it is more accurate to talk
of Quechua instead as is a ‘family’ of
several different related languages.

What does it mean to call Quechua a ‘family’ of related
languages?The first thing to notice is
that it is entirely normal for a
language to belong to a wider family:most languages in the world are like this.A well-known example is the language of
another great civilisation, Chinese.This too is not really one language but a family of related languages,
such as Mandarin Chinese (spoken in the capital, Beijing), Cantonese (spoken
further south in Hong Kong), and so on.The same goes for Arabic, which is also really more of a language family
than a single language:the Arabic
spoken in Morocco in North Africa is very different from that spoken in Saudi
Arabia, for instance.In fact, almost
all languages known today are members of one language family or another.

The second important point is that when we say that languages are related to each other in a family of languages, this does not just mean that they are similar in any old
way.One can often find languages that
appear to be similar in some respects, especially
in their structure, but which are not actually related
at all.One good example is Aymara and
Quechua:these are very similar in some
aspects of the structure and their pronunciation, but they are probably not
related at all.Even Quechua and Spanish
can be described as ‘similar’ in one way, in that they have borrowed lots of
words from each other:Spanish has
borrowed Quechua puma, kancha,
llama, waka (‘huaca’), and so on;and Quechua has borrowed Spanish words like karru
(from carro, car) and waka (from vaca, cow).But any language can borrow words from any
other;again, this does not mean that
they are actually related languages.Quechua and Spanish are definitely not.

Related languages are by no means just ‘any languages that might look
a bit similar’, then.To say that a
group of languages are related means far more
than that:it means that they all form
the same ‘family’ of languages.This is
something like a human family, in which the various children all have the same
mother. Take Spanish, Portuguese,
Italian, French, Romanian, Catalan, and others:these are quite different languages from each other now, but originally
they all started out from the same ‘mother’ or ancestor
language:Latin.All these languages together form what is the
best-known of all language families, called the Romance
family (because their common ancestor language Latin was the one spoken by the Romans).Think
back to how the pronunciations of the word for three
differ from one regional variety of the Quechua family to the next;and now listen to how just the same happens
for this word in the various languages of the Romance family, and of another
well-known European language family called Germanic.

Quechua

Romance

Germanic

*[kimsa]

(Latin)

*[tre:s]

*[θriyiz]

[kimsa]

[trεs]

[θŗi:]

[kima]

[treiš]

[dri:]

[kimsa]

[trε]

[dRai]

[kinsa]

[tRwa]

[tRe]

[treiə]

In these tables we have also written in greentext inside[brackets] exactly how each word is pronounced.The normal alphabet does not have enough
letters to show small differences in pronunciation, so to be more exact we use
some special ‘phonetic symbols’.To see
and hear the exact sounds that the various symbols represent,click here.

Quechua is very similar to Romance, then:it is not just one single language, but a
family of closely related and very similar languages.What this means is that at one time in the
past, there used to be a single ‘Original
Quechua’ language (the one that linguists call by a technical name, Proto-Quechua).We’ll be talking a lot about Original Quechua
here, trying to see whether we can answer the questions about where and when it
was spoken, and who by.For now, let’s
be careful, and not jump to conclusions.It is better to start off by not automatically
assuming that the answers must be Cuzco and the Incas.Yes, the Incas spoke a form of Quechua
similar to the Cuzco Quechua of today, but they certainly weren’t the first
civilisation to expand through the Andes, and nor is there anything to say that
they were necessarily the first or the only people ever to speak Quechua
either.The mystery is a deeper
one...

First of all what matters is to understand that wherever and
whenever it came from, over many, many centuries the Original Quechua gradually
‘broke up’, and turned into the many different Quechua varieties and languages
that are now spoken in different regions throughout the Andes.This is completely normal, and exactly what
happens in almost all languages.Compare
how the original Latin spoken in Spain, Italy and other regions of Europe
eventually turned into quite independent modern languages (if highly similar
ones):Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, and
so on.In exactly the same way, in
Chavín and in Cuzco the Original Quechua has by now turned into two different
but closely related modern languages, which for now we will call just Chavín Quechua and Cuzco Quechua.

Obviously we have no recordings of Original Quechua because nobody
now speaks it, so I have recorded my own voice pronouncing all the Original
Quechua words exactly as linguists have worked out that they sounded.Also, when we mention Original Quechua words
here, we put an asterisk * in front to show that it is not a modern pronunciation,
but one that linguists have worked out, such as Original Quechua *[kimsa].

So, how did these changes happen, the changes that made Chavín
Quechua, Cuzco Quechua, and all the other regional forms of Quechua, so
different from each other today?As the
centuries went by, two things happened.First, the Original Quechua began to expand
to other regions outside its homeland, but second, as it did so, the Original
Quechua also changed.

Certainly, all Quechua varieties started out from the same
Original Quechua, but for language it is a ‘fact of life’ that without
exception every language changes over time,
through the generations of the people who speak it.Latin could not escape changing into
different languages like Spanish and Italian;nor could the Original Quechua, so it too began to change through the
centuries.And it changed in all
regions where it was spoken.

The crucial fact that created Quechua diversity is this:in the different
regions, the Original Quechua changed in different ways.The result is that from a single Original
Quechua, we now have a changed form of Quechua in one region, and in another
region we have a form of Quechua that has also changed, but in a different way.

Let’s look at exactly how this
happened in our example word for three.The word was *[kimsa]:

•In the Chavín region the Original Quechua *[kimsa] changed pronunciation by losing the [s] sound completely, so now this word is pronounced
just [kima] in .

•In
the Cuzco region, the Original Quechua
*[kimsa] changed
by changing the [m]
sound into [n],
hence the pronunciation [kinsa] in .

•In other
regions neither of these changes
happened, and this word didn’t change at all, so it is still pronounced with
both [m] and [s],
as in Original Quechua, [kimsa], in regions
like and most of Ecuador, such as .

The table below summarises these sound changes:

Region

changes to the[s] in *[kimsa]

changes to the[m] in *[kimsa]

so here it is now
pronounced…

[s] is lost

no
change

[kima]

no
change

no
change

[kimsa]

no
change

no
change

[kimsa]

no
change

[m] ® [n]

[kinsa]

But if Original Quechua is no longer spoken, how can we be so sure
about how words were pronounced in Original Quechua?How can we
be sure that Original Quechua was pronounced [kimsa],
like in Ecuador and Huancavelica now, and not like in Cuzco, Bolivia or
Chavín?How do we know it is was not the
other way around:couldn’t the original
sound have been [n], and couldn’t it have been Ecuador and
Huancavelica that changed it to [m]
instead?This is an important issue, and
quite a complex one, so we explain exactly how linguists can work this out on
our More Details About Quechuapage.For now, though, we recommend you finish this
introductory page to see a few more examples of changes first.

So take the word for you
(singular), which in was *[qam].The pronunciation of this word too has also changed, but again in different ways in
different regions:

•This
time it is Chavín and other regions especially
in Central and Northern Peru that do not change the pronunciation at all, and
keep to the Original Quechua pronunciation [qam],
as in .

•In the Cuzco region, just like in *[kimsa] ® [kinsa],
the [m] has changed again, hence [qaŋ]
in .

•In
Huancavelica the [m] has not changed, but there has been another change
instead:the Original Quechua [q] has changed to [χ],
a sound like the pronunciation of the letter spelt <j> in Spanish.Hence [χam] in .

•In
Chimborazo
too the [q] has changed, only it has not
changed in the same way as Huancavelica.Rather, the original [q] has changed to [k] instead.Also, the [m] has changed in the same way
as in Cuzco, to [ŋ], hence [kaŋ]
in .

Again, the table below summarises these sound changes:

Region

changes to the[q] in *[qam]

changes to the[m] in *[qam]

so here it is now
pronounced…

no
change

no
change

[qam]

[q] ® [k]

[m] ® [ŋ]

[kaŋ]

[q] ® [χ]

no
change

[χam]

no
change

[m] ® [ŋ]

[qaŋ]

The most important things to notice are:

•Allthe regional
varieties have changed in one way or another.Chavín has not changed *[qam], but it has changed *[kimsa],
to just [kima].Neither Huancavelica nor Chimborazo has changed *[kimsa], but both have changed Original Quechua
*[qam].Cuzco, in these examples, has actually changed both words, to [kiŋsa]
and [qaŋ].

•Also,
not only do they change different words, but different
regions changethe same word, but in
different ways.Indeed different regions
can even the same sound in different ways:Huancavelica has changed the [q] in
Original Quechua *[qam] to [χ] as in [χam], and Chimborazo has changed it too, but
in a different way, to [k] as in [kaŋ].Chimborazo has also changed the [m]
to [ŋ] in the same way as Cuzco
Quechua.

The result of the Original Quechua changing in different ways in
different regions is that the Quechua now spoken in each of these four regions
has become different to the Quechua in every other region.No two regions, of the four we have looked at
here, now pronounce both of these words
the same.Chavín has[kima] and [qam];Chimborazo [kimsa] and [kaŋ];Huancavelica [kimsa] and [χam];Cuzco [kiŋsa] and [qaŋ].

The other important thing to notice from looking at the tables
above is that even if in some regions one of the words is still pronounced as in Original
Quechua, nobody, in any region, now pronounces
both words like the Original Quechua.So in fact, no
region anywhere now speaks Original Quechua.

Again, all this is completely normal, if we compare Quechua with
languages like Spanish and Italian.It
was the ancient Romans, two thousand years ago, who spoke the Original Latin,
but now nobody anywhere speaks like the Romans spoke any more, neither in Spain
nor Portugal, nor France, nor Romania – nowhere.Even the people in Rome itself by now speak a
language that after two thousand years of changes has become very different
from the Original Latin – in fact, it has changed into the ‘new’ language that
we now call ‘Italian’, and modern ‘Romans’ no longer understand the ancient
Romans.

It is exactly the same with Original Quechua:it used to be spoken once, but only many,
many centuries ago.If any Quechua
speaker alive today – from Cuzco, Chavín, Bolivia, Ecuador or anywhere – could
travel back in time to meet somebody from thousands of years ago who spoke
Original Quechua, the two of them would actually have pretty big problems to
understand each other properly!You
would need to travel a long way back in time, too:the last time that the ancestors of all today’s
Quechua speakers all spoke exactly the same Original Quechua was almost
certainly at least a thousand years ago, and
probably a lot earlier still (we’ll see more below on how we can tell
this).

Original Quechua is no longer spoken anywhere, then. It does remain very important, though, for us
to understand the similarities and differences between all the modern regional
varieties of Quechua, since they all started out from this one same original
form.And because it takes us back to
what the Quechua from all different regions used to have in common, Original Quechua can in some cases
help us find which ways of spelling Quechua are most useful so that people from
those regions can all spell their
language in a standard way, so that it
is easier for them all to read each other’s Quechua – while still always keeping to their own regional pronunciations, of course!For more on this, see our spelling
page.

Since nobody now speaks it as their native language, Latin is
often called a ‘dead’ language, though really Latin lives on, just changed, in
each of the different modern languages descended from it:Spanish, Portuguese, French, and so on.Each of these languages is just a very
changed form of Latin, each changed in different ways.Original Quechua too is now ‘dead’, but only
in this sense that nobody anywhere speaks exactly like that any more.Really it too lives on, though changed, in
every single one of the many different regional varieties of Quechua, all
descended from it.That is, every one of these regional varieties of Quechua has
its own true inheritance all the way back to Original Quechua, just as
much as all the other regions.

On the other hand, none of those regions still speak the Original Quechua.As we’ve already seen with our example pronunciations of the words for three and you, all
regions have changed from Original Quechua, and all in different ways.Original Quechua is not spoken anywhere like
it used to be, and all the regional varieties of Quechua spoken today are now
quite different to it.So no region anywhere can claim to speak the‘Original Quechua’:not Bolivia, not Ecuador, not Chavín, and
yes, not Cuzco either.Nowhere.In fact, it is simply impossible for any
region still to be speaking the Original Quechua, because all languages change
through time.

Importantly then, none of the different regional varieties of
Quechua now is really any more ‘original’ than any other.Quechua has changed everywhere, and it is
most important to accept that this includes the Quechua in Cuzco, because
people all over the Andes have a lot of confused ideas about Cuzco Quechua
(which we’ll come back to later).As you
can hear with the words for three and you, Cuzco Quechua, overall is no more nor less
original than Chavín Quechua, or Ecuador Quechua, or Ayacucho Quechua, or
Bolivian Quechua, or any other regional variety of Quechua.

It is obvious that it simply makes no sense at all to claim that
one region’s Quechua like Cuzco is ‘better’ or ‘more original’ than another:this would be just as silly as to complain
that Spanish is ‘bad’ because it’s “not proper Italian” or “not proper
Latin”!Spanish is not better or worse
than Italian, or French, or Portuguese, and so on, they are all just different descendants of Latin, and
none of them is still the Original Latin.

Exactly the same goes for Quechua.The different varieties of Quechua spoken in different regions are not
better or worse than each other, they are all equal descendants of Original
Quechua, and they are all just different!It is much better to enjoy this diversity,
and to be proud of being part of it, than it is to be arrogant – and wrong! –
by pretending that one regional form of a language (usually, your own!) is
‘better’ than any other.

Which
Regions’ Quechuas are Most Similar and Most Different to Each Other?

This is not to say that all regional varieties of Quechua are all equally different to each other:not at all.Cuzco, Puno, Bolivian and Ayacucho Quechua are all more similar to each
other than they are to Ecuador Quechua.And the Quechua of Central Peru is even more different again from all of
these.

Again it will help first to have a look at the Romance language
family for a comparison.Spanish-speakers find it easier to communicate with people who speak
Portuguese and Italian, and more difficult to understand French and
Romanian.This is because Spanish is
most similar to Portuguese and Italian, and more different to French and
Romanian.There are even languages that
are ‘in between’:Catalan is
‘intermediate’ between Spanish and French, and Galician is intermediate between
Spanish and Portuguese.This does not mean that they are a mixture of two languages, it just means that
there is a ‘chain’ of three languages, a,
b and c.

This is very common in Quechua too, where the different regions
often form ‘chains’, so the ones in the middle are intermediate between the
ones on either side.The Quechua spoken
in Cuzco, for example, is like the Quechua spoken in Puno in many respects, but
in a few respects it is more like the Quechua spoken in Ayacucho, and in some
other respects it has special forms all of its own.In this sense Cuzco can be considered
‘intermediate’ between them, but it is not a ‘mixture’ of Puno and Ayacucho
Quechua.Likewise Puno Quechua is
intermediate between Cuzco and Sucre Quechua, but again it is not a mixture, it
too is a separate, independent form of Quechua in its own right.In effect, as you go north from the south of
Bolivia all the way up to Huancavelica and the Yauyos mountains near Lima, the
Quechua changes very gradually from region to region.There is a big break between the Quechua of
Huancavelica and that of Huancayo, however:these are very different, despite being close to each other
geographically.

One way to help understand how the different regional forms of
Quechua can be more similar or more different to each other is to compare them
to a human family again.All the members
of a big family are not related to each other in exactly the same way.Your cousins may ultimately have the same
ancestors to you, but they as not so closely related to you as your brothers
and sisters are.With your brother or sister
your relationship is immediate, through your mother;but with your cousins have to go back further
in your ‘family tree’ to find your common ancestor, your grandmother.

More or less the same goes for languages.The Quechua of Cuzco, Puno and Bolivia can be
seen as all ‘sisters’ of each other.Ecuador Quechua, though, is more different, because it is only their
‘cousin’, not another sister.The
Quechua varieties of Central Peru like Ancash, Huánuco or Huancayo are more
different again, because they are even more distant ‘cousins once removed’
within the very big, extended Quechua family.

Thinking of regional varieties of Quechua like this in terms of
‘generations’ within a family gives us an idea not only of how similar of
different they are to each other, but also of how ‘old’ their relationship
is:

•Back
just one generation to the same‘mother’:the regions whose
Quechua is most similar to each other, e.g. Cuzco, Puno and Bolivia.

•Back
two generations, to an earlier time and only the same‘grandmother’:regions whose Quechua is a lot more
different:e.g. Cuzco and Ecuador
Quechua.

•Or
back more generations, to a much earlier time still, only to the same‘great-grandmother’:regions whose Quechua is very different
indeed, and which cannot understand each other’s Quechua well at all:e.g. Cuzco and Chavín Quechua.

So, depending on how similar the Quechua is in one region or
another, we can see which ‘generation’ within the family they belong to.This is how, by looking at the Quechua of
different regions to see exactly how different they are, and the exact ways in
which they differ, linguists can even get an idea of their origins and history.This includes working out approximately how
long ago – how many ‘language generations’ ago – it was that people
somewhere in Andes spoke the Original Quechua language from which all the
modern Quechua regional varieties are descended.

We know that languages change over time, and so the more time that
passes, the more different they become.So if we look at how similar languages are, we can get some idea (though
not truly exact dates) of how long their ancestor language has been diverging,
in order for its ‘offspring’ to end up as different from each other as they now
are.In other words, through how many
generations?Are the descendant languages
in that family like ‘sisters’, close ‘cousins’, or more distantly related ‘cousins’?

First we need to have a look at other language families where we
know for certain, from historical records, how long they have been
diverging.Again the Romance languages
are ideal, because we know how different they are to each other now, and we
also know the historical fact of how long their ancestor language, Latin, has
been diverging:that is, for over two
thousand years since the Ancient Romans first spread their Latin out of Rome
into new areas like Spain.The result of
over two millennia of divergence is now that the Romance languages are really
quite different to each other:Spanish,
Italian, Portuguese, French and so on.

Let us not forget that Spanish itself has now been spread
throughout the world for long enough for the process of divergence to have
started again:now not everyone in the
world who speaks Spanish speaks it exactly the same.Depending on where they come from, people can
have a Spanish accent, a Chilean accent, a Mexican accent, a Peruvian accent,
and perhaps most famous of all, a Buenos Aires accent, “che”.(In fact, cheis originally a word borrowed from the indigenous Tupi-Guaraní
languages, where it means brother.)Even within a country like Peru, for example,
people can have a Cuzco or highland accent and say ‘pollo’ (with a full elle),
‘asco’, ‘afto’;or they can have a Lima or a coastal accent
and say something like ‘poyyo’,
‘ahco’, ‘apto’ instead.In this case we also know from history how
long Spanish has been spread throughout the world and had time to diverge:more or less since Columbus, i.e. for about five hundred years.Since the differences between the different
regional and national forms of Spanish around the world have ‘only’ had five
hundred years or so to develop, the result is that they are still much smaller
than the differences between Spanish and Italian or French, which have had over
two thousand years to develop.

Now let us compare these two cases to Quechua.It is not so easy to measure exactly how
different languages are (though that is what we will be attempting in the next
stage of this Sounds of the Andean Languages
research), but we can at least say that the various regional forms of Quechua
like Cuzco and Chavín are clearly much more different to each other than the
various forms of Spanish around the world, and about as different as languages
like Spanish, Portuguese and Italian.In
other words, the diversity within Quechua is much closer to the level of the
diversity within Romance than that within Spanish.So even by a rough comparison, it seems clear
that the Original Quechua must have been diverging for a period of time much
more of the order of the two thousand years
of Romance, and much longer than just five hundred years like Spanish.Which means Quechua has been expanding and
diverging certainly since very long before the
Inca Empire.

We have more evidence too, when we see that Cuzco Quechua is so
similar to the Quechua of all of the regions of Bolivia (certainly much more so
than to Ecuador or Chavín Quechua).The
level of diversity only within the Quechua spoken from Cuzco to Bolivia is not
much more than the diversity between modern varieties of Spanish around the
world.Again, this comparison suggests
that the Quechua in those regions does come from a common ancestor that has
been diverging for not much longer than the five hundred years that Spanish has
been diverging, perhaps just a century or two more.One scenario that this fits well with is of
course the Inca expansion into Bolivia in the century and a half before the
Spaniards arrived in the 1530s.For this
and for other reasons, it seems likely that it was indeed the Inca Empire that
took its own regional form of Quechua from Cuzco into much of Bolivia.On the other hand, this only serves as even
more confirmation that the much more different Quechua of Central Peru must
have diverged from Cuzco Quechua long, long before then.

So, while exact details and dates are not certain, and wherever
Quechua’s original homeland was (which we’ll come to shortly below), the
overall outline from a great deal of detailed linguistic and historical
research is very reliable and clear.

1.Original Quechua
began expanding and diverging through the Andes probably something like two
thousand years ago, certainly long before the Inca Empire, whose major
expansion was only six centuries ago during the 1400s.Original Quechua may well be related to some much,
much older culture than the Incas – perhaps even Chavín, though this suggestion
is still very speculative and does take us perhaps too far back in time for the
level of diversity within Quechua.

2.In any case, Quechua was already very widely
spoken across much of the Andes well over a thousand years ago.In particular, it had already reached most of
Centraland
Southern Peru, already in very different regional varieties.

3.Cuzco Quechua was just one of these varieties,
and the Inca Empire only spread it into some new areas, especially Bolivia.Most areas north of Cuzco, however, had already been speaking their own
Quechua for many centuries before the Incas reached them – this includes not
just Chavín but the whole of Central Peru, such as Ancash, Huánuco, Junín, and
Huancayo.

4.It is not certain when Quechua reached Ecuador, but there too it may well have first
arrived not with the Incas (Ecuador Quechua is too different from Cuzco and
Bolivian Quechua for this to seem likely), but a few centuries before
them.Nonetheless, Quechua in Ecuador
was no doubt reinforced and strengthened by the arrival of the Incas too.

Quechua not only reached the different regions of the Andes at
different times, but it also reached them in quite different ways.To see how, we need to think of Quechua in
its human and ethnic context.We can see
that a language can spread to different regions in two main ways.

•As
times changed and civilisations rose and fell, original Quechua-speaking peoples moved, and took their language with them,
thus gradually spreading their language into other regions.This could happen either by peaceful migration
and coexistence, or by conquest.In fact
in the history of the Andes there are two particularly well-known types of
movement of peoples like this:

–Firstly, the same people often deliberately
split up into groups that moved into different areas so that their people as a
whole could control various of the different ecological altitude levels from
the high Andes to the Amazon jungle and the coast.This gave all of them access to each other’s
natural resources, native species and crops from all their different
‘ecological levels’.This type of
expansion may explain how Quechua reached some Amazonian areas in various
countries, for example, even though Quechua has long been a predominantly
highland language.(Note, though, that
in earlier times it was also spoken on the Pacific coast of Peru too.)

–The Incas, during their rule, used their famous mitma system, whereby they deliberately moved whole
tribes from region to region around their vast Empire.They did so for various reasons, sometimes to
move rebellious tribes out of their homeland and implant them into areas where
they would be surrounded by more loyal peoples.More important for our interest is that alternatively they moved loyal
subjects, who already spoke Quechua, to settle newly conquered lands in their
Empire.The Incas also constantly moved
huge armies around their lands, and many of their soldiers ended up settling
far away from home too, not least when the Empire collapsed with many armies
still in the field throughout the Andes.

In many regions where Quechua
seems, rather strangely, only ever to have been spoken in some relatively small
parts of the whole region, one plausible explanation is that the ancestors of
those Quechua-speakers may first have been brought there in an Inca mitma, and/or an imperial army.Perhaps this applies to some of the isolated
groups of Quechua-speakers in the far north of Peru, such as in the regions of
Cajamarca (in the villages of Chetilla and Porcón), Lambayeque (Inkawasi and
Cañaris), and Chachapoyas. More
generally, it may also explain how many Quechua-speakers reached southern
Bolivia, ‘leapfrogging’ the Aymara-speakers in the north of the country.

•Quechua
also reached new areas in quite a different way too:Quechua-speakers themselves did not move into
a region, nobody actually moved at all.Rather, the peoples who already
lived in a particular region stayed where they
were, but just learned Quechua.Eventually many of these peoples came to stop speaking their own native
language and preferred to speak only Quechua instead.This way their homeland too turned into a new
Quechua-speaking region.

This happened especially in
regions where Quechua was gradually adopted as a very useful common language
(known as a lingua franca) to facilitate
communication and trade between many different peoples who all spoke their own
different languages.This happened to
some extent during the Inca period, of course, when Quechua was the official
language of the Empire.Indeed even for
a while after the Spanish conquest, Quechua was
recognised as one of the four ‘general languages’ (‘lenguas generales’) of the Spanish-ruled Andes, and kept
expanding into new areas, such as southern Bolivia and various parts of
Amazonia.

In any case, though, this
expansion as a lingua franca seems to have
happened even before the Inca Empire too, when Quechua seems to have already
been expanding northwards as a trading language.It looks like this happened particularly in
Ecuador, where both the highland and the jungle peoples still today keep their
separate ethnic identities, even though many of them now speak Quechua.Each of them keeps their own regional
varieties, though, and in fact these may still show signs of the influence of
each people’s original native tongue.

We have seen, then, how by comparing even modern regional
varieties of a language, and with a lot of detailed study and experience, it is
possible for linguists to work out the main stages of expansion of a language
family.This also helps us towards the
final question:where in the Andes did
Original Quechua start out from?

Many people instinctively think of Cuzco, because it was the
origin of the Inca Empire.But the
origin of an Empire is not necessarily the ultimate origin of a language
family.In fact we already know that the
Inca Empire was relatively late, it really expanded only in the 1400s, and we
also know that Quechua expansion began probably a thousand years before
then.It was spoken in places like
Chavín long before the Inca Empire ever existed, so the question of where
Quechua started out from goes back much earlier than the Incas.

To try to answer a difficult question like this, there are various
types of information that researchers can use.

•Firstly
there are some more principles of linguistic science that can help.One is that the region where there is the
highest diversity of language varieties in the smallest area is usually the
place where it has been diverging the longest, i.e. near its original
homeland.The diversity actually seems a
lot higher within the Quechua of Central Peru, such as the Ancash department
and the mountainous inland provinces of the Lima department.These seem good possible candidates as
possible original homelands for Quechua.

•Another
valuable linguistic tool is the study of place-names (‘toponymy’), because it
is normal for place-names to reflect languages spoken in an area long, long
ago, even if the language spoken there has changed since then.Beware:studying place-names is very difficult and it is easy to make
mistakes!This task needs a lot of
linguistic experience, but if it is done well it can reveal a great deal.And it actually shows that much of Southern
Peru probably once spoke forms of Aymara, and that Quechua only arrived there
much later, replacing the Aymara and pushing it further south into
Bolivia.It is very clear from hosts of
old place-names in the Cuzco region too that much of it actually once spoke
Aymara, as well as – or more likely before – speaking
Quechua.From historical documents too,
it seems that even the Inca nobility themselves originally spoke a form of Aymara,
but they and their people had switched Quechua before their Empire expanded.

•There
are many more sources of valuable clues too:looking at the exact relationships between the generations of the
Quechua family;evidence from regional
forms of Quechua that have since died out (such as the one whose grammar was
recorded in 1560 by the Dominican friar Domingo de Santo Tomás);studying in detail the very rich
relationships between Quechua and Aymara, in different regions;and looking at archaeological knowledge about
the movement of peoples to try to match it with the possible history of their
languages.

Combining all of this knowledge ends up being very complex work of
many specialists, all debating together, as they have done over the last few
decades.But by now the outline seems
clear and quite reliable, because almost all of the research points to similar
conclusions.Original Quechua was most likely spoken first of all
somewhere in Central Peru, perhaps on the coast but more likely in the highland
interior.And this is where it
probably started expanding from, both northwards and southwards, at a date probably somewhere around two thousand
years ago – perhaps more, perhaps less, but certainly long, long before
the Inca Empire.That last great
flourish of Andean civilisation did speak Quechua too, certainly, and indeed
helped expand it still further to its greatest ever extent, but the Incas’ was
not the only, nor the Original Quechua.Quechua is much richer and more diverse than just Cuzco, and connected
to many more of the native cultures of the Andes.

Because so much has been claimed and mistakenly believed about
Cuzco Quechua, it is important to be clear on exactly where it fits into all
this.Yes, the Incas spoke Quechua, and
yes, they spoke a form of Quechua very similar to modern Cuzco Quechua.But no, the Incas did not speak the Original Quechua, and they only took their particular form of Quechua to a few of the
regions in the Andes where it was spoken today.Most regions had long had their own Quechua, every bit as original,
indigenous and true as the Quechua spoken today in Cuzco.The Quechua
language does notoriginally
or uniquely come from the Incas:it is a deeper, and even richer, part of the
indigenous cultural inheritance of the Andes.

It makes no sense to think that any region speaks some ‘debased’,
‘bad’ form of Cuzco Quechua, or of any other Quechua.The Quechua in every region is just as ‘good’
and proper as in all the other regions;wherever you come from, you can – and should! – be every bit as proud of
your own Quechua as anyone else!

This is the end of our basic explanations about the diversity and
origins of Quechua, but if you want to know more, see more examples, and
find the answers to lots more questions you may still have about Quechua, click
to see the contents of our More Details About Quechuapage.

As you will also have realised, the Quechua language family is closely
bound up with the Aymara language family too, so we recommend you also to read
our page on the Origins and Diversity of
Aymara.